The GP Liaison Nurse Database

Addenbrookes NHS Foundation Trust
Cambridge, UK

The GP Liaison Nurse Database was developed for the Emergency Department at Addenbrookes
Hospital. The application is used internally by GP Liaison Sisters to capture information
about patients who are referred to the emergency department by their general practitioners.

A user can search over 1.9 million records almost instantaneously.

An application transaction is initiated by a phone call from the patient's general practitioner.
The doctor must call the hospital directly in order to file a patient admission request. Since
the application connects directly to the hospital's main Patient Administration System (PAS), a
user can log in and perform a patient search across 1.9 million records almost instantaneously. Once
a record is located, the user works with the patient's doctor over the phone in order to quickly
complete the remaining clinical information.

The GP Liaison Nurse Database also stores and manages patient demographics and clinical
symptoms. It provides reporting functionality to monitor the types of referrals received
by the hospital, as well as the outcome of each patient. Addenbrookes Hospital uses
this information for organizational planning and clinical assessment.

Application size and scope

The application is comprised of 15 tables across two Microsoft SQL Server databases.
The largest of these is the main hospital data repository, the Patient Administration
System, which holds approximately 1.9 million records.

There are 51 Web pages within the application. An average of six users access the
database, so approximately 14,000 transactions go through the application each month.

The project

The application was completed in just one month, with the Iron Speed Designer
portion of the project taking three weeks.

Code extensions and customizations

This application used only standard out-of-the-box code customizations from the Iron
Speed Designer Code Customization Wizard.

A user can login to enter a patient's clinical symptoms.

Layout customizations

We used the standard "White" design theme provided with Iron Speed Designer for
the basic page styles. Our customization code centered all the pages in the application.

Iron Speed Designer impact

I completed the project in six weeks using Iron Speed Designer. This would not
have been possible on my own. In the end, I saved 70% of the estimated development
time using the tool.

Next steps

The next stage of development is to implement role-based security in the system
to allow designated administrators to add and delete users. Stage three development
will add records output to PDF, and exporting them to our existing Electronic Medical
Records (eMR) system.

About the developer

Marc is the Application Support lead at Addenbrookes NHS Foundation Trust. He has
worked at Addenbrookes for more than three years, primarily supporting and developing
Trust applications written in Microsoft Access and Microsoft SQL Server. While Marc
has experience in Web development, particularly static and interactive training tools,
he had no .Net experience prior to completing the GP Liaison Nurse Database application
with Iron Speed Designer.